Codex · Character
Sister Vaela Norn
- Location
- Brindlehook
- Posing as
- Pilgrim healer
- Allegiance (hidden from players)
- Veiled Concord
As she stood on 25 Emberwane, 742
For GMs running long homebrew campaigns
Know what was true in your world on any date.
Define whatever kinds of things your world actually contains, from bloodlines to wards to debts to seasons, and Dexes keeps every one of them straight on your map, in your prose, and across your campaign's whole history.
- Google sign-in
- 30-day demo world
- Player seats free on every tier
Free, as soon as we have room for you. We are admitting new worlds in batches while we scale, so you may join a waiting list. Your place is saved when you sign in, and signing in again any time checks it for you.
Varn Hollow
The Deep Well
Harrowcap Hill
The Titan Steps
Brindlehook
Gloamwatch Keep
The Siltmere
Saint Orlen's Ford
High Aster
Caldris
Vaela Norn
The party
On this day
The ruins are identified as a seal
Drag the date. The map and the Codex resolve to that day. Illustrated with the demo world you can open after signing in.
Still in development
Dexes is in development. You are welcome to join and try it.
It was originally being built for personal use and is still being refined. Everything on this page works today, and it is evolving week to week.
- Expect rough edges. Some things will be unfinished, and some will have bugs. If you meet one, Send feedback in the app goes straight to us.
- Things will change. Features, layouts, limits, and estimated prices.
- Keep your own copy. Every story can be exported whole, images included, from its menu. While we take backups, we recommend that you also do so.
- Free base tier. The free tier is real, and we are admitting new worlds in batches while we scale, so you may be asked to wait a little.
The problem with notes
Your campaign has years of history. Your notes only know today.
A document tells you what was true the last time you edited it. A long campaign has no single now. It has a chronology, and holding that chronology in your head is half the work of running the game.
Session 31 notes
Vaela leaves for the keep. Before the vault or after? Check session 29. Also: who did she say she was?
Group chat, pinned
varnwood_final_v3.pngIgnore the old road, I moved it.
Cast list
| Vaela Norn | Pilgrim healer | Varn Hollow? |
| Elian Voss | Surveyor | Missing since? |
"Where was Vaela when the party went into the vault?"
30 Emberwane, 742- On King's Ash Road, bound for Gloamwatch Keep.
- Still posing as a pilgrim healer. The party had no reason to doubt it yet.
- The party was at the Titan Steps, two days' travel north.
Write it down once. It stays correct everywhere, on every date.
How it works
A world database, not a world encyclopedia.
A wiki stores text about things. Dexes stores the things themselves, and your map, the tree, your prose and the timeline are all views onto them.
1 Your world's own vocabulary
You decide what kinds of things exist.
Not a fixed set of templates. Define your own object types with their own fields, relationships, inventories, memberships and nesting, then lay each one out the way you want to read it.
- Six types are ready on day one: characters, groups, items, locations, nations and biomes.
- Add a ward, a bloodline, a debt or a quest as a type of its own, with the fields it needs.
- A layout editor decides how each type reads, for you and for your players.
CharactersGroupsItems
LocationsNationsBiomes
Fields you defined
- Category Text
- Description Long text
- Source Text
- Image Image
An object of that type
Lore & Secrets
The Kindly Turning
The keep is not invisible. The ward makes travelers decide they have no reason to approach it, forget directions, and reinterpret maps.
Fields you defined
- Quest Type Text
- Recommended Level Text
- Location Text
- Hook Long text
- Rewards & Outcomes Long text
An object of that type
Quests & Adventures
Find Elian Voss
Magistrate Iona Pell hires the party to recover the missing surveyor or his records.
Fields you defined
- Type Text
- Story Role Text
- Goals Long text
- Methods & Abilities Long text
- Notes Long text
An object of that type
Creatures & Entities
Ulthuun, the Dreaming Stone
The buried intelligence beneath the Titan Steps, and the reason the Deep Well calls to sleepers.
2 One object, every view
Whatever you invent works everywhere.
One object is a pin on the map, a node in the tree, an endpoint in the relationship graph and a link in your prose. Not four records that point at each other. One object, seen from four places, on whatever date you pick.
- Rename it once and every view follows.
- Every object lists the maps it is on and the chapters that mention it.
- Memberships, holdings and field values can each carry a start and an end day.
Map
Gloamwatch Keep
Codex tree
Lady Aveline Sarrow
The Vessel Project
C The Crownless Marches
G Gloamwatch Keep
Lady Aveline Sarrow The Vessel Project
Graph
Aveline
Vessel Project
Vaela
Liora Vey
GGloamwatch Keep
AvelineVessel ProjectVaelaLiora Vey
Tome
The Household of the Keep
Guests are received at Gloamwatch Keep by Lady Aveline Sarrow, whose hospitality hides the scale of her resources.Swipe across: the same object in all four.
3 A GM face and a player face
Show your table exactly what they should see.
Visibility is set field by field, so one character carries what the table knows and what only you do. There is no second copy to keep in step. Player View shows you the world as a player gets it, before they do.
- Hide a whole object, a single field, or only its portrait.
- Share a secret with one player without telling the rest of the table.
- Nothing is published to the internet. Your world is private until you invite someone.
Lady Aveline Sarrow
- Hometown
- High Aster Players can see this
- Social status
- Landed upper gentry and internationally respected private scholar Players can see this
- Type
- Villain Hidden from players
- Story role
- Mistress of Gloamwatch Keep and director of the Vessel Project Hidden from players
- Memberships
- The Vessel Project, Veiled Concord Hidden from players
What is inside
Four surfaces. One set of objects. One date.
Map, Codex, Timeline and Tome are views onto the same world. Pick a day in any of them and the others follow.
Interactive maps
Your map art, made alive.
Upload the map you already love, then add what a static image cannot hold: pins, nation and biome regions, roads and rivers, curved labels, layers, and movement paths that follow the date.
Codex
A codex shaped like your world.
Every person, place, faction and object, plus any type you define. Nest them, relate them, and date every change.
Groups
Veiled Concord Sister Vaela Norn
Gray Veil of Borrowed Faces Lady Aveline Sarrow
Basin Survey Fellowship
Lantern Roadwardens
Timeline
See the world as it was then.
Run a real calendar with leap years, your own months and weeks, or plain milestones for looser stories. Every object keeps its own history.
Emberwane Year 742, Lantern Reckoning
Tome
Prose with living links.
Write chapters in a live-preview Markdown editor. Type two square brackets to link a person, place or page, and every object lists where it is mentioned.
Chronicle of the Crownless Marches
The World at a Glance
The Crownless Marches are a broad frontier protectorate governed through temporary charters. Their unofficial capital is Pellmarsh, where clerks attempt to turn disputed land into legible records. The Marches include caravan towns such as Greyhaven Crossing and newer communities like Varn Hollow and Brindlehook.Relationship graph
Memberships, holdings and allegiances drawn as a graph that follows the selected date.
Object history
Births, deaths, joinings, losses and field changes for any one object, in order.
Ideas
Markdown notes for half-formed plans, each pointing at the objects it concerns.
Image library
One library for portraits, badges and maps, with stock art to start from and a record of where each image is used.
Sharing and roles
Invite by email. Players read, co-GMs build, and a single object can be shown to one person alone.
Import and export
Your world leaves when you do: a standard archive with its images, and it imports again the same way.
Every map and portrait on this page comes from the demo world. It is waiting inside, yours to edit for 30 days or to keep.
Get started for freeOne tool, two modes
Your novel does not grow a dice button.
Nothing here is hardcoded to a game system. Every world starts as a general storytelling world. Switch one to tabletop and the table tools appear in that world alone: dice, initiative, encounters, clocks, fog of war, and a player view.
Maps
Codex
Timeline
Ideas
Tome
History
Graph
Dice and tables
Initiative
Encounters
Clocks
Fog of war
Player View
Codex, map, timeline and prose, and nothing you did not ask for. If you are writing a novel, you will never see a dice roller.
A dice roller with saved rolls and tables, an initiative order your players watch live, prepared encounters, progress clocks, fog you paint day by day, and a preview of what each player sees. Your next project does not inherit any of it.
Your table
Private by default. Free for your whole table.
Your world is yours. Sharing it with your players does not mean publishing it to the internet, and bringing your table along is never a budget decision.
Players are free, on every tier
Player seats are free on the free tier too, and are never counted against it. Only co-GM editor seats are metered, because those are people building the world alongside you.
Private until you invite someone
No public gallery, no ads on your campaign. A world is visible to you and to the people you invite by email, and to nobody else.
One object, two faces
Visible to Players is set field by field, so a single character carries what your table knows and what only you do. There is no second copy to keep in step.
Pricing
What it costs today.
There is a free tier, and it is a real one. The paid tiers are support tiers on Patreon, for worlds that outgrow it and for co-GM seats.
Dexes is still in development. It was built for private use first and is still being refined, and what it costs to host other people's worlds is not known yet. So the paid tiers run through Patreon for now, and these prices and limits are our best guess today. They may change as we learn what the hosting really costs.
Limits today. A limit only ever stops new things being added: nothing you have made is hidden or removed.
| What each tier includes | Free$0 | Copper$5 a month | Silver$10 a month | Gold$25 a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image storage | 250 MB | 1 GB | 5 GB | 20 GB |
| Stories | 3 | 3 | 10 | Unlimited |
| Maps per story | 5 | 5 | 25 | Unlimited |
| Codex objects per story | 100 | 100 | 1,000 | Unlimited |
| Custom types per story | 5 | 5 | 10 | Unlimited |
| Tomes per story | 1 | 1 | 10 | Unlimited |
| Timeline days per story | 100 | 100 | 1,000 | Unlimited |
| Player seats | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Co-GM seats per story | None | None | 2 | Unlimited |
| After 12 months without signing in | Account may be deleted | Kept | Kept | Kept |
Swipe the table sideways to compare the tiers.
To support Dexes, pledge on Patreon and connect your Patreon account from the Support Tier section of your profile. Your tier updates by itself, and if a pledge ends there is a grace period before anything changes.
Your first evening
Start with the map you have and the dozen names that matter.
That is an evening, not a project. Everything else moves across the way it comes up in play.
Sign in with Google
No new password to keep. If we are at capacity, your place in line is saved under your account.
Open the demo world
A complete campaign with a map, a populated Codex, a timeline and written chapters. It is yours to edit for 30 days, or to keep.
Bring your map
Upload the image you already use and pin the places your table keeps going back to.
Add what comes up
After each session, write down what changed and when. A guided tour points at each control as you reach it.
Before you start
The questions GMs actually ask.
Still unsure? The help pages cover every screen in detail.
I already have two years of notes. Do I have to move them all?
No, and you should not try. Start with the map you already have and the dozen people, places and factions that come up every session. That is an evening, not a project. Everything else moves across the way it comes up in play: the moment you need an NPC's history, you write it once, in the place it belongs, and it is there from then on.
Worlds built all at once tend to be abandoned all at once. The ones that last get built a session at a time.
How long before this is actually useful?
You do not have to start from a blank page. Dexes offers you a fully built demo world when you arrive, with maps, a populated codex, a timeline and written chapters, so you can see the shape of the thing before deciding how to build your own. It is a real, editable sandbox: change anything, break anything. Keep it and it becomes your world, or load it any time from the bottom of your story list.
There is also a guided tour built into the app that walks you through each surface as you reach it, so you are never staring at a toolbar wondering what it does.
Can I get my data out?
Yes, always, and you can bring it back in. Export a world, its full contents and its images, whenever you like. It is a standard archive you can open with any unzip tool: a plain copy of your own data, not a proprietary bundle you need Dexes to read. Import works the same way, so moving a world between accounts or restoring an old one is your call, not a support request.
Nobody should build two years of history somewhere they cannot leave.
What does it cost?
There is a free tier and it is a real one: private worlds, your own map art, custom types, the full timeline, and your whole table along for free. It is not a trial that expires.
It has the room to build a world and run a game in. Worlds that keep growing, and long campaigns do, eventually want more space than the free tier holds, and that is what the support tiers on Patreon are for, alongside co-GM editor seats.
Do my players need to pay?
No, and they are never counted against your tier. Player seats are free on every tier including the free one. Only co-GM editor seats are metered. A player who never logs in costs you nothing at all.
I am not running a game. Is this only for GMs?
No. Every world is a general storytelling world until you switch it to tabletop mode, and the table tools only appear in the world you switched. Codex, map, timeline and prose work the same either way.
Your world already has a history. Give it somewhere to live.
Sign in with Google, explore a fully built demo world, and start connecting the maps, characters, histories and chapters of your own.
Build a world that remembers.